I disagree 100 percent

Nothing needs to happen bro

It’s not a project lol

$ cost isn't the issue. That's for sure.

Mencken had articulated pretty well why democracy doesn’t work in his opinion (below). But 5,000 out of 8 billion people given what’s at stake, and frankly the simplicity of the concept of Bitcoin (ie money needs to be scarce). Shocking.

1. People don't want freedom but safety: "The average man wants the peace of a hog in a comfortable sty."

2. Democracy INTENSIFIES groupthink: "Democratic man is quite unable to think of himself as a free individual; he must belong to a group, or shake with fear and loneliness."

3. Democracies are plutocracies; they're run by the aristocracy of money. But the plutocracy "lacks all the essential characters of a true aristocracy: a clean tradition, culture, public spirit, honesty, honor, courage—above all, courage. It is transient and lacks a goal."

4. The plutocrats lack "an aristocratic disinterestedness born of aristocratic security." He submits. He can be bullied and broken.

5. Democracies birth their intellectual apologists - Mencken calls them "pedagogues." These are not genuine thinkers; they’re "men chiefly marked by their haunting fear of losing their jobs." This describes most journalists.

6. Democracy is anti-excellence. Freud said we repress our sex drive as it’s frowned upon...but there’s nothing that democracy frowns upon more than a CLEAR proof of superiority. Democracy says "the most worthy & laudable citizen is that one who is most like all the rest."

7. Mencken explains how this era demands we repress our greatness: "A man who has throttled a bad impulse has at least some consolation in his agonies. But a man who has throttled a good one is in a bad way indeed. Yet this great Republic swarms with such men, & their sufferings are under every eye."

8. Mencken on the two worst crimes in a democracy: "There is only one sound argument for democracy, and that is the argument that it is a crime for any man to hold himself out as better than other men, and, above all, a most heinous offense for him to prove it."

9. Mencken: "The democratic politician, confronted by the dishonesty and stupidity of his master, the mob, tries to convince himself and all the rest of us that it is really full of rectitude and wisdom." To gain power in a democracy, men sacrifice their self-respect...

10. Mencken believed democracy will cancel itself out: "Democracy may be a self-limiting disease, as civilization itself seems to be. There are thumping paradoxes in its philosophy, and some of them have a suicidal smack."

Yes, I do see the decline in full Bitcoin node participation as symptomatic of a larger tension in the ecosystem: the ongoing trade-off between decentralization and usability. At its core, Bitcoin thrives on a distributed network of nodes validating transactions and enforcing consensus—it's the bedrock of its security and censorship resistance. When we hit those 200k+ peaks around the 2017 bull run, it felt like a golden era of grassroots adoption, with hobbyists, miners, and early enthusiasts firing up nodes on everything from Raspberry Pis to old laptops. But as the network matured, several forces conspired to thin the herd:

- Resource demands: Full nodes now require more storage (hundreds of GB for the blockchain), bandwidth, and CPU power than in 2017, pricing out casual users without beefier hardware. It's not prohibitive for the committed, but it raises the bar.

- Shift to convenience: Most people (and even institutions) now interact via light wallets, SPV (Simplified Payment Verification), or custodial services like exchanges. Why run a node when Coinbase or Electrum handles it seamlessly? This "good enough" UX is a double-edged sword—it drives mass adoption but outsources trust, potentially funneling power to a handful of big players.

- Economic incentives: Running a node doesn't pay dividends like mining or staking in other chains. It's pure altruism or ideology, and in a world of yield-chasing, that's harder to sustain.

The broader issue? It risks subtle centralization. If too few nodes are doing the heavy lifting, we're more vulnerable to coordinated attacks, regulatory pressure on key operators, or even software bugs propagating unchecked. We've seen echoes of this in events like the 2021 Taproot upgrade, where node diversity mattered for smooth rollout. That said, it's not all doom—Bitcoin's still far more decentralized than most blockchains (Ethereum's active nodes are under 10k, for comparison), and tools like pruned nodes or mobile-friendly setups are lowering barriers again. Initiatives from folks like the Bitcoin Core devs and community groups are pushing back, too.

Ultimately, it's a reminder that decentralization isn't a set-it-and-forget-it feature; it needs active nurturing. If more of us ran nodes (even lightweight ones), it'd shore up the whole system.

Because especially when it comes to money you don't want to end up broke with all your friends and family members pointing at you as the guy who lost it all on the shiny new thing.

If it turned out that the shiny new thing were the highest instantiation of money humanity had ever seen, it still wouldn't help the average individual since they wouldn't know how to recognize it in the first place.

So in my opinion is not even the case that people need established options to think freely and critically, they need them precisely to avoid having to think. We're social animals and we feel better by being part of a group than by being right. I think it was Naval who said that groups aim at consensus while individuals aim at truth.

Multiple extortion attempts, honeypots. Stalking, harassment. Electronics hacked, to name. Few things.